Walter Ross always wanted to graduate high school. At 90, he finally did, getting his diploma alongside his 17-year-old grandson.

Walter Ross, 90, always wanted to graduate high school, but life got in the way. The Edmonton man finally fulfilled his pledge on Thursday when he collected his diploma with his grandson Jeff Ross, 17.

When Walter Ross turned 90 in February, he thought about his long life and everything that’s filled it: His large and loving family, decades of work as an insurance broker and 34 years of marriage — and counting — to his darling wife, Eileen.

But two regrets, entwined and ever-present, poked through to the front of his mind. Now it was time to face them.

“I said, ‘You know what I’m going to do this year? I’m going to finish high school and I’m going to learn French,’ ” Ross told the Star from his home in Edmonton.

The great-grandpa fulfilled a big part of that pledge on Thursday night, when he strode across the stage in a cap and gown to accept his high school diploma. His 17-year-old grandson, Jeff, was there, too. It was the ceremony for his graduating class of more than 300 from St. Francis Xavier High School.

“It was just delightful,” said Ross. “They all stood up … They gave me a great reception. They handled the whole thing magnificently.”

It was a moment 75 years in the making. He’d dreamed of graduating high school since he was 15; life just got in the way.

A 90-year-old Edmonton man who left high school when he was 15 to take care of his family has received his high school diploma alongside his grandson. Walter Ross says he now plans to learn French and the piano.

Ross grew up in a rural area west of the provincial capital, a place called Duffield, where he did his learning in a one-room schoolhouse for nine years. “It certainly wasn’t a town. It wasn’t even a hamlet,” he chuckled.

Ross was 15 when his father had a heart attack. With his two older brothers enlisted with the Royal Canadian Air Force, Ross was pulled out of school to help run the family’s general store while his father was bed ridden.

“I wanted to continue my education,” Ross recalled, explaining that he started to take correspondence courses over the next few years, passing Grade 11 while juggling his new business responsibilities. “Then I turned 19, so I had to report into the draft,” Ross said.

He was denied entry on medical grounds, however, and shortly after that, his father died. Ross’s mother then decided to sell the store, and her youngest son decided to give high school another shot, taking a trip into Edmonton to meet with the deputy education minister to ask if he could challenge the Grade 12 exams that August, 1944.

“He lined me up with three tutors, and now we had six weeks to do all my studies for Grade 12,” said Ross.

Come exam-time, Ross passed everything, except French. So no diploma.

At the same time, his uncle had been pushing him to take a job with an insurance broker he knew in Edmonton. Ross took him up on it and began a 55-year career in the business. But he never forgot that pesky failed French exam.

“My thought was to try it out for a while and go back to do my French.”

But, as can happen to most anyone, the ebbs and flows of life carried him away. In the ensuing years, he married, started a family and joined the reserve army, becoming a commissioned officer in the 1950s, all while plugging away at his insurance job in Edmonton.

In the late ’60s, he and his wife separated, leaving Ross to look after their seven children as a single dad. “Two of them were preschoolers,” he said. “I hadn’t considered remarrying and I didn’t do any dating for about 15 years.”

Then he met Eileen, who Ross described as his “delightful” second wife, to whom he’s still married.

Now positioned as patriarch of a big family — “I have 24 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren,” he said proudly — Ross said he was happy to finally earn his long-coveted high school diploma.

After he announced his intention to earn it on his birthday, a cousin looked into it, and he was awarded the diploma based on his experience as an army officer, said Ross.

“I feel good … It was just a delightful experience for me.”

As for learning French, Ross is still working on that.

“We’ve got this program where you listen to the tape and then you have a book to go with it. Fifteen minutes a day for 12 weeks … I’m not quite sure I believe it,” he laughed.

There’s still time to figure it out though. He is, after all, fresh out of high school.

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